Quote:
Originally Posted by AnotherCat
The following is not specifically aimed at you gmw and Hamlet53, but what you have said, which is a view held by others, provides a point to launch from for a general response from my point of view.[...cut for brevity only...]
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Thanks for your response, but it doesn't really help me much. I have already admitted that I understand people wanting anonymity in some polls, what I have trouble understanding is why
these polls (in which voting has essentially the same effect as a post saying "I liked book x")?
I am familiar with how metadata can be used to extract identifying information. But in this case we don't appear to be asking for any metadata not otherwise accessible. (I suppose it might be harder to write a script to pull out everyone's preferences from posts and identify them all. But I could, if I wanted track down one individual, easily use existing features on this forum to discover if a person had made other book recommendations, along with everything else they may have accidentally given away in posts.)
It is possible, I suppose, that some people who never post about book preferences might be willing to give those preferences on an anonymous vote. I imagine this forum is like most I've been on, where there are many more viewers than there are active participants, so there could be many such people. Maybe we need another (anonymous) poll asking users if they participate on polls even if they rarely post messages.
I find this a bit amusing because these are names I would be ignoring anyway, I'm only interested in those that I'm familiar with from their active participation on forum. (My minor amusement should not be taken as derogatory. I accept that some prefer to remain anonymous, and that the best way to do that is to avoid posting messages, it's hard to say anything meaningful without giving things away. It is more of a wry acknowledgement of the contradictory situation that all communities face.)